Last month, Bloomberg ran an article on “administrative bloat” at universities, “Bureaucrats Paid $250,000 Feed Outcry Over College Costs.”In today’s Star Phoenix, Satya Sharma, associate professor of Anthropology at the University of Saskatchewan, provides some perspective on the situation there. Sharma writes:

A total of 805 people work in central administration. Human resources alone has more than 250 people all over campus.

The university president makes $400,000 a year and senior administrators earn in the range of $200,000 to $350,000. We don’t need that many highly paid executives to govern the university. Let’s first find efficiencies in this white elephant, which is an ever-growing pyramid.

In 1970, the central administration had a skeletal staff of 21 people while today it’s 805 – a jump of more than 3,700 per cent. In 1970, there were a few shy of 800 faculty members and a little more than 13,000 students. Now the faculty number is just above 1,100, or 38 per cent more, and there are about 22,000 students, an increase of 69 per cent more. Who is winning here?